After reading several fiction works of Charles Williams that are clearly informed by his Romantic Theology (I’m thinking particularly of Shadows of Ecstasy and The Greater Trumps, but it can be detected in the love interest subplots of The Place Of The Lion and Many Dimensions and probably others), I determined to get this one under my belt for insight into exactly what he means by the mystical trappings of the romantic relationships portrayed in his novels.

It is tough and tedious reading, but has the benefit of being a relatively straight-forward explanation of the idea (for Williams standards at least). His summation reads:

The principles of Romantic Theology can be reduced to a single formula: which is, the identification of love with Jesus Christ, and of marriage with His life. This again may be reduced to a single word — Immanuel. Everything else is modification and illustration of this.

Oh! It is so clear now! :-D Let me unpack this… Immanuel means “God with us” in Hebrew, which Christians associate with Jesus, thanks to Matthew 1:23. So Williams is saying here that romantic love manifests Christ in some literal way and that the progression and development of that love mirrors his life. The Oddest Inkling blog does a great job explaining this further. Go there for the quick summary. I’ll discuss below my thoughts on the Theology.

If you are familiar with Christian theology (what are you doing here if you are not?!), then you notice he is alluding to the Incarnation above. He goes on:

To students who do not accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, the suggestions made will probably appear fanciful; it is at any rate certain, as a compensation, that to no Christian can they appear as anything but natural and probable, even if in the end they should have to be, for one cause or another, rejected.

I can’t speak for those who do accept the Incarnation (I do not), however I can confirm that it certainly appears fanciful to me. In fact, the whole theology appears like Christian post-hoc justification for non-Christian ideas on romantic love. Williams acknowledges that the Church has had an unsure relationship with romantic and sexual love since its inception.

In my opinion, this goes all the way back to Jesus himself. I am not implying that Jesus’ teachings were sexually repressive and whatnot; rather, I believe he was an apocalyptic prophet who was not concerned with long-term, earthly things. The Pauline writings carry this torch as well–see 1 Corinthians 7 on this point. Now there is a man setting down a convenient heuristic for the short-term–sex in marriage for the purpose of otherwise maintaining self control for those who would fail at celibacy. That’s a policy on sex that cares not at all for the long-term survival of the species. It was only after the disappointment of failed apocalypticism that the early Church began to look more kindly at marriage. Matrimony as a sacrament is a rather late development in Christianity. For that reason, Williams’ assertion that Romantic Theology is “natural and probable” is unfounded.

Williams does mean Love=Christ quite literally. Here’s some pull quotes about sexual intercourse to give you the flavor:

Intercourse between man and woman is, or at least is capable of being, in a remote but real sense, a symbol of the Crucifixion. There is no other human experience, except Death, which so enters into the life of the body; there is no other human experience which so binds the body to another being. […]

In that intercourse which is usually referred to as the consummation of marriage the presence of Love, that is, of Christ, is sacramentally imparted by each to the other. If this act is not capable of being a sacrament, then it is difficult to see in what way marriage itself is more sacramental than any other occupation; and its inclusion in that group of rites which have the Eucharist as their crown is undeserved.

Putting the creepiness of a ménage à trois with Jesus aside, he does have a fair point about Christianity here. Whether sexual repression is a flaw of Christianity (my view) or an unfortunate theological misunderstanding (Williams’ view), Williams is right to point out the importance of sex to the human experience and its power to create intimacy between individuals. But then, his theology does not strike me as particularly useful for cultivating intimacy and shared spiritual fulfillment with your partner. On the contrary, it seems to me more useful for extracting meaning from an otherwise dissatisfying relationship.

…which brings me to my feminist problems with the Theology. In theory the principles are applied both ways, but when he shows them in practice they are not. The women in his novels are simultaneously idealized as symbols of Christ and used as objects of veneration or as means for spiritual fulfillment. What’s more, these ideas are paired with his “submitted saint” trope wherein these women give themselves up to being used. It is a one-two punch that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Still, reverse the gender roles and I would reject this again. Self-immolation is not a virtue and all the mythologizing does not foster a healthy respect of your partner as an individual. If you are thinking about the Crucifixion while having sex with your spouse, I humbly submit to you that you are doing it wrong. Williams’ ideas on romantic love may not be perverted, but they are perverse.

This succeeds as a sober but readable history of the phenomenon of witchcraft hysteria. Williams traces the development of the Christian ideas of the phenomenon as a reaction against paganism, folk medicine, and proto-scientific thinking while adopting a conscious agnosticism as to the existence of witches as defined by these ideas. Despite acknowledging the lack of evidence and all the other caveats one might consider, Williams ultimately concludes that where there is smoke there is fire. Two cases he offers as most representative are Gilles de Rais and La Voisin. Insofar as these are not rank hyperbole, they show very little of a real tradition of witchcraft. If anything, they show an attempt by the mentally unstable to live up to an invented mythos–the 80s death metal of the Middle Ages.

What the book shows is a systematic building up of bullshit that feeds on itself in the same way that stories of alien abductions do today. Only someone like Charles “I Want to Believe” Williams could take such a reasoned look at the evidence and conclude that the likelihood of the existence of real witchcraft was ever probable. He concludes:

If ever the image of the Way of Perversion of Images came into common human sight, outside the Rites of the Way, it was before the crowds of serious Christians who watched a child, at the instance of pious and intelligent men, scourged three times round the stake where its mother was burned.

Indeed! And we actually have copious evidence that this actually did happen. There is no doubt about that point.

It is hard not to feel a little bit gleeful when the tax hypocrisy of guys like Soros is exposed. Don’t get me wrong, I support tax avoidance that does not break the law. Criticizing the rich for legally avoiding taxes is the political left’s slut-shaming equivalent. That said, rich guys who shed crocodile tears over the supposed injustice of their low tax rates while simultaneously going out of their way to exploit it are assholes.

Giving away your fortune at the end of your life is not the same as having paid high taxes all your life. It is not atonement; it is self-refutation. If you believe in high taxes, then pay high taxes.

“But doing that only makes sense if all rich people do it,” says the apologist. Such apologists are usually not rich and not economically aware. These men know better. They know the opportunity cost of paying now exceeds the value of the goods & services the government would provide with their tax revenue. Otherwise, it would make sense for them to pay extra tax unilaterally and demonstrate it.

The implication then is that the value of the goods & services would be higher per dollar of tax with a greater total sum of tax revenue, but is this a reasonable assumption? No! More money doesn’t suddenly make the government more eager to be efficient. In fact, the law of marginal utility tells us that the value to the government of each additional tax dollar is necessarily less, not more. Is there some new service that can only be implemented with a minimum amount of tax that exceeds current revenue? Not likely, since the government has no qualms running a monstrous deficit already.

No, even now these guys believe that they can put their money to better use via private charity than through those services funded by taxes. And you know what? They are right! Their laments over lenient tax law only make sense if they also harbor the opinion that they are morally superior to others who they must believe manage their fortunes so poorly as to provide less value to society than infamously inefficient tax-funded goods and services do. Maybe they are also right in that regard. Or maybe they are being elitist pricks.

In a prior post I alluded to a question I asked in a class on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien that the instructor dodged because it was religious in nature. The instructor encouraged us to view the themes and motifs that recur in Tolkien’s work over time in typological terms. My question was:

Much typology in the New Testament is “reverse engineered” from the OT by its authors (if you will excuse the term). In your examples, most seemed ascribed either to intention of a character (eg. Aragorn) or just generally from Tolkien himself in narration (eg. Theoden’s ride). How much of his use of typology might we attribute to the meta-framework? In other words, did Tolkien intend this to be the result of Bilbo, Frodo, and scribes of Gondor in the 4th age re-interpreting and harmonizing old lore and new history like the gospel writers did?

While he was okay having a generally theological discussion about the concept of typology, he was not okay with discussing the idea that typologic parallels exist because later authors consciously borrow from older authors. The former has a religious component; the latter does not. As an atheist, I am expected to have a civil discussion of the former, but apparently the latter is off limits because the lack of supernaturalism might offend a theist? I think this difference is of critical importance if we want to apply the concept of typology to Tolkien’s writings, but he “didn’t want to get into that” for reasons left unstated.

In Christian terms, typology refers to events in the Old Testament being “types” that are foreshadowings of events in the New Testament. For example, Jonah being swallowed and spit up by a fish is akin to Jesus’ resurrection. There are a million examples. They are the sort of thing that is easy to find in hindsight with a sympathetic eye. As I recall, I first learned the term in Bible college in discussion of the protoevangelium—a passage in Genesis that supposedly refers to Jesus. I remember thinking (and still think) that this crock of shit is a great litmus test for gullibility. If you find the argument convincing, then you are a credulous fool.

These foreshadowings are portrayed by believers as great proofs of divine manipulation in history, evidence of fulfilled prophecy. Rarely do they rise beyond the level of mildly interesting coincidence and when they do it is obvious that the later writer is ripping off a well-known text. It should come as no surprise to us that the author of Matthew portrays Jesus as a new Moses, nor does it require some profound theological explanation.

The origin of the typological phenomena bears directly on the question of eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s writings—a concept he develops at length in On Fairy-Stories. We know that Tolkien was a Christian and anachronistically read the resurrection into all kinds of myths—he explicitly says so in the epilogue of On Fairy-Stories. It is ironic that he defines eucatastophe as “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur” and yet we manage to find it recurring enough to create a term for it and reinterpret an entire corpus of religious texts as mere typological signposts to Jesus. But I digress… The implication here is that typological parallels between Silmarillion events and Hobbit/LoTR events can be interpreted as pointers to a divine plan culminating in a Middle Earth Jesus that hadn’t arrived yet.

However, Tolkien was also a rabid creator of frame stories. We have a whole meta-scribal history of the Red Book of Westmarch to consider, not to mention the conceits of the handing down of the Quenta Silmarillion, actual manuscript history of the Book of Lost Tales, or time traveling ideas explored in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers. There is plenty of room here to imagine that the “received” texts Tolkien published were elaborated by Middle Earth scribes over the generations, the events and storytelling shaped by lore the scribes themselves received. Rather than being of divine origin, the typology is due to Middle Earth scribal practices and authorial license, in the same way that Matthew’s Old Testament allusions are due to him intentionally alluding to the Old Testament.

Anyway, both explanations have some explanatory power given what we know about Tolkien. Both are likely to have some element of truth to them. However, in either case—and in any discussion of the phenomena of typology—the question of what is the generating force of the phenomena in the secondary world has important implications that should not be overlooked.

I recently tried re-reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in Spanish. I couldn’t make it past chapter three because I got bored and was too aware that the plot suffers the deeper one reads. However, reading the first two chapters in a foreign language reminded me just how fantastic those two chapters are. (Re-reading something in a different language is as close as you can get to the experience of reading something for the first time.)

Anyway, this reminded me of an incident a few years ago in a class I took online that included this book on the syllabus. And since today is Easter—the holiday commemorating the event that this book allegorizes—this is a doubly appropriate time to share it.

After the course lecture on Wardrobe we had the opportunity to send in questions and comments which might be addressed in the final wrap-up lecture. I sent in the following:

Why a table and not a totem pole? Beyond being a convenient landmark for meetups, the table seems to have no special utility to Narnians. Yet it is a curiously convenient object for performing sacrifices. When it breaks it reminds us of the temple veil from the New Testament story which explicitly was being used for sacrifices in Jesus’ day. Why does Narnia have a conspicuous ancient sacrificial altar out in a field somewhere that no one sacrifices on? If this is supposed to imply the “Deeper Magic” is fated, why no foreshadowing within the Narnian world? This strikes me as a glaring signpost that CSL is more concerned with message over story.

This is in regards to the stone table on which Aslan is sacrificed by the White Witch. It has always annoyed me how contrived this whole aspect of the book is. It reeks of wholesale transplantation of Christian theology. In class, the prior lecture had discussed the degree to which CSL consciously borrowed from Christianity. One relevant datum was CSL’s description of the genesis of the idea in Of Other Worlds, wherein he says that the story began with a mental picture of the faun holding an umbrella, “then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.” Notice what is missing from CSL’s explanation: a stone table. Incidentally, in my opinion the best part of the book is that original bit derived from his mental picture–before he began consciously tinkering with it…

So anyway, the lecturer did use my question in class. He explained that there were several similar questions and he had chosen mine as representative. Then he spent several minutes good-naturedly chastizing me for overlooking a single relevant passage in Chapter 13. When the White Witch decides to sacrifice Edmund she says:

“I would like to have done it on the Stone Table itself,” said the Witch. “That is the proper place. That is where it had always been done before.”

I felt quite embarrassed by this because he was nominally correct. I had overlooked this passage. On the other hand, his long-winded response did not address the substance of my comment. Did these throw-away lines really adequately rebut the assertion that the Stone Table was not logically integrated into the Narnian mythos? I thought (and still think) not. I also felt (perhaps unfairly to him) that he had cherry-picked my version of the question because of this noted flaw. Otherwise, he might have addressed the substance rather than the technicality.

At any rate, because of the nature of the online interface (the instructor is broadcasting video & audio, but students can only type text directly to the instructor who may or may not notice), I did not feel capable to respond. In a typical classroom, it would be easy for me to interrupt and clarify or amend my question as necessary to facilitate real dialog. Instead, I felt that I had blundered into a rhetorical trap, without ability to confute, and with the knowledge that the poor presentation of my view would be disseminated indefinitely. Obviously, this bothered me so much that I still think about it three years later.

[Update: It has been pointed out to me that the above is poorly stated. My intent was not to ascribe intention but to explain how I felt from my point of view—a distinction I obviously failed to communicate. Certainly the lecturer deserves not only the benefit of the doubt on this point, but my explicit statement that in my experience he is not the sort of person who would intentionally make a student feel that way, which is why this post has now been edited to remove identifying information.]

That is where it had always been done before.

Contrary to the lecturer’s contention, this little passage solves nothing at all. Granted, it does contradict my snark that the Stone Table was unused–we learn that it has been used to sacrifice traitors before. Ok, so what? It explains nothing while heaping on loads of additional questions. Go ahead and transfer all of my comments in regards to Edmund’s/Aslan’s sacrifice to the earlier (unknown) sacrificial victims. Who were those victims? Why didn’t Aslan save them like he did Edmund? Why have a convoluted “traitor clause” as the world’s foundational law? None of this is explained here or in the creation myth in The Magician’s Nephew.

In fact, there are no satifying answers to these questions because CSL borrowed these ideas wholesale from Christianity where people have been dissatisfied with the proposed solutions since Jesus’ death. Why would the Emperor Beyond the Sea make such a dumbass law? Why intervene now for Edmund and not earlier for the poor bastards already sacrificed? The story only makes any sense if you already know the Christian dogma and don’t ask the questions you know you shouldn’t ask in Sunday school.

If he thought my question was out of bounds because it touched on religious themes (odd for a CSL course, but understandable), then he should have just said that (which he did on a different occasion which I might blog about another time). If it was in-bounds, then I think my point was unfairly dodged.